Re: Thoughts on a builtin read

[Chris Siebenmann <cks>]

 Malte brings up the desire for shift to shift things besides $*.
This has been thoroughly beaten to death in the mailing list; see my
message <91Sep11.132925edt.2708@hawkwind.utcs.toronto.edu>, which has
a supershift function which involves no backquotes and no risk of
carefully quoted variables 'escaping'.

 You can find it in the first mailing list archive on archone.tamu.edu,
/pub/rc/rc-list.1991.Z. I highly recommend reading the mailing list
archives; many issues have been discussed and summarized there.

	- cks
[to save people's time, here's the function again:
# 'supershift' function for rc.
# usage:
#	sshift varname
#	sshift varname number
# shifts the list varname by number (default 1) positions.
fn sshift { if (~ $#* 1 ) { _sshift $1 1 $$1 } else { _sshift $1 $2 $$1 } }

# this function does most of the work.
# _sshift NAME COUNT LISTELEMS
# shift LISTELEMS COUNT items left, and assign the result to NAME.
fn _sshift { _vn=() { _vn=$1; shift; shift $1; shift; $_vn=$* } }
]